CA decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth. maternal mortality 1/3 nat'l avera
***********Mothers die too often because women’s health isn’t valued in the US ***** (and the latest puke assault on women's health care will make things even worse!!)
(this is a lengthy, extremely important read)
California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth
The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here's why.
Kristen Terlizzi woke up on July 16, 2014, in the intensive care unit at Stanford University to the news that the placenta connecting her to the child she'd just given birth to had spread like a cancer through her entire abdomen. Six weeks earlier, Terlizzi, then 32, had been diagnosed with placenta accreta, a condition that can cause the placenta to grow out of control. In a normal pregnancy, the placenta develops inside the uterus, attaches to the uterine wall, and then is flushed out of the body after the birth.
In accreta, which doctors believe is most often caused by scarring from prior cesarean sections (over half of which are unnecessary), the placenta sticks around and embeds. The condition was exceedingly rare in the 1950s, occurring in only one in 30,000 deliveries in the US. Today, because of the rise in C-sections, it shows up in about one in 500 births. One in 14 American women with accreta die, usually from hemorrhaging too much blood. Childbirth is one of the most common reasons women go into hospitals, and yet the American health care system handles complicated pregnancies with a stunning lack of preparation and precision. Put simply, ************women who give birth in the US have a greater risk of dying relative to other rich countries — and the problem has been growing worse at a time when America’s peers have continued to make pregnancy safer. *********
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Her pregnancy was so exceptionally complicated, it inspired a scientific journal case study. But it’s also emblematic of how unpredictably dangerous birth can be, even for healthy women — and how the deadliest pregnancy complications are survivable when hospitals prepare for them.
The Stanford doctors and nurses who treated her were ready with a precise set of steps to manage her care. Among them: hemorrhage guidelines created by a doctor named David Lagrew as part of Stanford’s California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (CMQCC), a revolutionary initiative to make births safer for moms in the state. A decade into their project, they’ve proved that even within America’s imperfect health system, death in childbirth is not an inevitability.
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California has managed to buck America’s grim maternal death trend. In the US, childbirth has been growing more dangerous recently. Maternal mortality — defined as the death of a mother from pregnancy-related complications while she’s carrying or within 42 days after birth — in the US soared by 27 percent, from 19 per 100,000 to 24 per 100,000, between 2000 and 2014.
That’s more than three times the rate of the United Kingdom, and about eight times the rates of Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, according to the OECD. It's a stunning example of how poorly the American health care system stacks up against its developed peers. More women in labor or brand new mothers die here than in any other high-income country. And the CDC Foundation estimates that 60 percent of these deaths are preventable.
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https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/29/15830970/women-health-care-maternal-mortality-rate
